These questions seem confused, but I’m having trouble articulating exactly why I think that. Something like “you are trying to take concepts that are appropriate when you model the world at one level of detail and applying them to a model of the world at a more detailed level, and this is a type error.”
Surely neurological processes are “arrangements of particles” too, though.
I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn’t there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn’t.
Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of ‘temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles’, for which ‘processes’ is a much less awkward shorthand.
But saying “pleasure is a neurological process” seems consistent with saying “it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually”, and doesn’t seem to necessarily imply that “you can’t find a ‘pleasure pattern’ that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.”
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of “good” things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you’ll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you’ll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it’s good, otherwise it’s bad.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc
It seems like you’re making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a ‘natural kind’, that it doesn’t ‘carve reality at the joints’, and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).
I don’t like the expression “carve reality at the joints”, I think it’s very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or ‘things’ in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you’re working… ‘Good’ may form a cluster or may not, I just don’t even know how you could give evidence either way. It’s unclear how you could formalize this in practice.
My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you’re trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don’t work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question. You may ask “what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?” or “how could I induce that state again?”
You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?
You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I’d say “life” is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you’d do with the answer. If it’s “I just want to know how it really is, I can’t imagine doing anything practical with the answer” then it’s too vague to be answered.
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question.
Asking “how do qualia systematically relate to physics” is not a useless question, since answering it would make physicalism knowledge with no element of commitment.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
It seems to me that good and bad are actually easy to define indeed. Minusdash gives a definition: Good is a state an entity strives to obtain (again). This is a functional definition and that should be enough. How states are physically represented in other beings is unknown and is in my opinion irrelevant.
There are many different kinds of pain and pleasure, and trying to categorize all of them together loses information.
For starters, the difference between physical and mental pain and pleasure.
To get more nuanced, the difference between the stingy pain of a slap, the thudy pain of a punch, the searing pain of fire, and the pain from electricity are all very distinct feelings, which could have very different circuitry.
I’m not as sure on the last paragraph, I would place that at 60% probability.
On the first point—what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various ‘flavors’ of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.
Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I’m okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the ‘pleasure’ end of the continuum will have important commonalities ‘under the hood’ with others at that same end. And those commonalities will vanish, and very possibly invert, when we look at the ‘agony’ end.
Yes, and the point seems to go double for pleasure. There are many varieties, and most are associated with a particular sensation. The pleasures of sex are very different from the pleasures of ice cream, for example. Admittedly, there is such a thing as just feeling good—but maybe that’s a whole-body sensation. And now I’d like to move on from falenas108′s point, to make one of my own.
Where I’m going with this is: I’m not sure it’s even possible to instantiate the pleasures as we know them without duplicating our circuitry. So if your AGI in question 4 is not supposed to be built on the brain’s patterns, you might want to rephrase the question: you can certainly provide reward signals, but calling them “pleasures” might be misleading. And in question 5, I have dire doubts about the experiences of an upload, unless the upload is onto a computer that is explicitly designed with many of the detailed features of mammalian brains. As you point out, much of the research you’ve encountered is “not applicable outside of the human brain.” I suspect there’s no way around that: investigating the brains of humans (and other animals we are reasonably confident feel pains and pleasures) is the only way to understand these phenomena.
Tononi’s theory supports my cautions, I believe. On Tononi’s account of qualia, it is extremely unlikely that a system built on radically different principles from a human brain would experience the same qualia we do. You can probably see why, but if not, I’ll sketch my reasoning upon request.
This all seems to be about the “qualia” problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food—if indeed the alien eats food).
Similarly you could tell that it’s suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.
I don’t think there is anything special about the actual mechanism and neural pattern that expresses pain or suffering in our brains. It’s that pattern’s relation to memories, sensory inputs and motor outputs that’s important.
Probably you could even retrain the brain to consider a certain fixed brain stimulus to be pleasure even though it was previously associated with pain. It’s like putting on those corrective glasses that turn the visual input by 180° and the brain can adapt to that situation and the person is feeling normal after some time.
I see the argument, but I’ll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on “Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning”, as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment (‘seeking’, ‘learning’, and ‘liking’ in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view behavior as the gold standard of whether it’s experiencing pleasure or suffering. At this point it may be the most practical approach, but it’s inherently imperfect.
My strong belief is that although there is substantial plasticity in how we interpret experiences as positive or negative, this plasticity isn’t limitless. Some things will always feel painful; others will always feel pleasurable, given a not-too-highly-modified human brain. But really, I think this line of thinking is a red herring: it’s not about the stimulus, it’s about what’s happening inside the brain, and any crisp/rigorous/universal principles will be found there.
Is valence a ‘natural kind’? Does it ‘carve reality at the joints’? Intuitions on this differ (here’s a neat article about the lack of consensus about emotions). I don’t think anger, or excitement, or grief carve reality at the joints- I think they’re pretty idiosyncratic to the human emotional-cognitive architecture. But if anything about our emotions is fundamental/universal, I think it’d have to be their valence.
Yes, this is the qualia problem, and, no it isn’t easy to imagine pain and pleasure being inverted. Spectrum inversion isn’t a necessary criterion for something being a quale. You seen to have landed on the easy end of the hard problem.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of “red” perception and the original “green” pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of “green” liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal “green” sensation is extremely linked to the word “red” (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still “seeing green” when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?
Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it’s about an impossible scenario. If the brain can’t rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).
I don’t think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn’t contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It’s a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can’t tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn’t a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it’s using its nose when it’s lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn’t a productive line of thinking. If it quacks… It’s like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether “irregardless” is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.
When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I’d say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn’t about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven’t encountered yet and we don’t have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.
I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
That would be an interesting experiment to do. We already know that people can adapt to wearing lenses that invert the picture or shift it laterally. Changing the colours while maintaining differences would be a little more complicated but quite feasible. You would need something similar to a VR headset, with a front-facing camera in front of each eye. The camera sensors would be connected, via some electronics to process the colours in any desired way, to the screen that each eye would see. This would be doable by a hobbyist with the necessary technical know-how. It might be as simple as cannibalising a couple of pocket cameras and switching some of the connections to the screen on the back.
These questions seem confused, but I’m having trouble articulating exactly why I think that. Something like “you are trying to take concepts that are appropriate when you model the world at one level of detail and applying them to a model of the world at a more detailed level, and this is a type error.”
I understand the type of criticism generally, but could you say more about this specific case?
I’m curious if the objection stems from some mismatch of abstraction layers, or just the habit of not speaking about certain topics in certain terms.
Pleasure is not a static “arrangement of particles”. Pleasure is a neurological process.
You can’t find a “pleasure pattern” that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.
This isn’t a perfect articulation of my objections, but this is a difficult subject.
Surely neurological processes are “arrangements of particles” too, though.
I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn’t there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn’t.
Processes are not “arrangements”, it’s a dynamic vs static difference.
Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of ‘temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles’, for which ‘processes’ is a much less awkward shorthand.
But saying “pleasure is a neurological process” seems consistent with saying “it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually”, and doesn’t seem to necessarily imply that “you can’t find a ‘pleasure pattern’ that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.”
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of “good” things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you’ll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you’ll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it’s good, otherwise it’s bad.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
It seems like you’re making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a ‘natural kind’, that it doesn’t ‘carve reality at the joints’, and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).
I don’t like the expression “carve reality at the joints”, I think it’s very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or ‘things’ in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you’re working… ‘Good’ may form a cluster or may not, I just don’t even know how you could give evidence either way. It’s unclear how you could formalize this in practice.
My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you’re trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don’t work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question. You may ask “what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?” or “how could I induce that state again?”
You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?
You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I’d say “life” is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you’d do with the answer. If it’s “I just want to know how it really is, I can’t imagine doing anything practical with the answer” then it’s too vague to be answered.
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.
Asking “how do qualia systematically relate to physics” is not a useless question, since answering it would make physicalism knowledge with no element of commitment.
Thanks, that’s exactly what I was trying to say!
It seems to me that good and bad are actually easy to define indeed. Minusdash gives a definition: Good is a state an entity strives to obtain (again). This is a functional definition and that should be enough. How states are physically represented in other beings is unknown and is in my opinion irrelevant.
A possible answer:
There are many different kinds of pain and pleasure, and trying to categorize all of them together loses information.
For starters, the difference between physical and mental pain and pleasure.
To get more nuanced, the difference between the stingy pain of a slap, the thudy pain of a punch, the searing pain of fire, and the pain from electricity are all very distinct feelings, which could have very different circuitry.
I’m not as sure on the last paragraph, I would place that at 60% probability.
On the first point—what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various ‘flavors’ of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.
Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I’m okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the ‘pleasure’ end of the continuum will have important commonalities ‘under the hood’ with others at that same end. And those commonalities will vanish, and very possibly invert, when we look at the ‘agony’ end.
On the second point, the evidence points to physical and emotional pain sharing many of the same circuits, and indeed, drugs which reduce physical pain also reduce emotional pain. On the other hand, as you might expect, there are some differences in the precise circuitry each type of pain activates. But by and large, the differences are subtle.
Yes, and the point seems to go double for pleasure. There are many varieties, and most are associated with a particular sensation. The pleasures of sex are very different from the pleasures of ice cream, for example. Admittedly, there is such a thing as just feeling good—but maybe that’s a whole-body sensation. And now I’d like to move on from falenas108′s point, to make one of my own.
Where I’m going with this is: I’m not sure it’s even possible to instantiate the pleasures as we know them without duplicating our circuitry. So if your AGI in question 4 is not supposed to be built on the brain’s patterns, you might want to rephrase the question: you can certainly provide reward signals, but calling them “pleasures” might be misleading. And in question 5, I have dire doubts about the experiences of an upload, unless the upload is onto a computer that is explicitly designed with many of the detailed features of mammalian brains. As you point out, much of the research you’ve encountered is “not applicable outside of the human brain.” I suspect there’s no way around that: investigating the brains of humans (and other animals we are reasonably confident feel pains and pleasures) is the only way to understand these phenomena.
Tononi’s theory supports my cautions, I believe. On Tononi’s account of qualia, it is extremely unlikely that a system built on radically different principles from a human brain would experience the same qualia we do. You can probably see why, but if not, I’ll sketch my reasoning upon request.
This all seems to be about the “qualia” problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food—if indeed the alien eats food).
Similarly you could tell that it’s suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.
I don’t think there is anything special about the actual mechanism and neural pattern that expresses pain or suffering in our brains. It’s that pattern’s relation to memories, sensory inputs and motor outputs that’s important.
Probably you could even retrain the brain to consider a certain fixed brain stimulus to be pleasure even though it was previously associated with pain. It’s like putting on those corrective glasses that turn the visual input by 180° and the brain can adapt to that situation and the person is feeling normal after some time.
I see the argument, but I’ll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on “Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning”, as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment (‘seeking’, ‘learning’, and ‘liking’ in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view behavior as the gold standard of whether it’s experiencing pleasure or suffering. At this point it may be the most practical approach, but it’s inherently imperfect.
My strong belief is that although there is substantial plasticity in how we interpret experiences as positive or negative, this plasticity isn’t limitless. Some things will always feel painful; others will always feel pleasurable, given a not-too-highly-modified human brain. But really, I think this line of thinking is a red herring: it’s not about the stimulus, it’s about what’s happening inside the brain, and any crisp/rigorous/universal principles will be found there.
Is valence a ‘natural kind’? Does it ‘carve reality at the joints’? Intuitions on this differ (here’s a neat article about the lack of consensus about emotions). I don’t think anger, or excitement, or grief carve reality at the joints- I think they’re pretty idiosyncratic to the human emotional-cognitive architecture. But if anything about our emotions is fundamental/universal, I think it’d have to be their valence.
Yes, this is the qualia problem, and, no it isn’t easy to imagine pain and pleasure being inverted. Spectrum inversion isn’t a necessary criterion for something being a quale. You seen to have landed on the easy end of the hard problem.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of “red” perception and the original “green” pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of “green” liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal “green” sensation is extremely linked to the word “red” (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still “seeing green” when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?
Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it’s about an impossible scenario. If the brain can’t rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).
I don’t think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn’t contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It’s a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can’t tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn’t a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it’s using its nose when it’s lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn’t a productive line of thinking. If it quacks… It’s like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether “irregardless” is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.
When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I’d say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn’t about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven’t encountered yet and we don’t have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.
I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.
That would be an interesting experiment to do. We already know that people can adapt to wearing lenses that invert the picture or shift it laterally. Changing the colours while maintaining differences would be a little more complicated but quite feasible. You would need something similar to a VR headset, with a front-facing camera in front of each eye. The camera sensors would be connected, via some electronics to process the colours in any desired way, to the screen that each eye would see. This would be doable by a hobbyist with the necessary technical know-how. It might be as simple as cannibalising a couple of pocket cameras and switching some of the connections to the screen on the back.